The Birth of the Grand Old Party: The Republicans' First Generation

The Birth of the

Grand Old Party

The Republicans' First Generation

Edited by ROBERT F. ENGS

and RANDALL M. MILLER

Afterword by James M. McPherson

Published in Cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia

PENN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

Philadelphia

Copyright © 2002 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10   9   8   7   6   5   4   3   2   1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

The birth of the Grand Old Party : the Republicans' first generation / edited by Robert F. Engs

  and Randall M. Miller ; afterword by James M. McPherson.

    p. cm.

   ISBN 0-8122-3674-2 (cloth : alk. paper).—ISBN 0-8122-1820-5 (pbk.: alk. paper)

   Published in cooperation with the Library Company of Philadelphia.

   Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

   1. Republican Party (U.S. : 1854-)—History—19th century. I. Engs, Robert Francis. II. Miller, Randall M. III. Library Company of Philadelphia.

JK2356 .B52 2002

324.2734—dc21                                                                                  2002020335

Contents

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 The Ideology of the Republican Party    Eric Foner

CHAPTER 2 Making and Mobilizing the Republican Party, 1854-1860 Michael F. Holt

CHAPTER 3 War Is the Health of the Party: Republicans in the American Civil War    Phillip Shaw Paludan

THE GENESIS AND GROWTH OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY: A BRIEF HISTORY

CHAPTER 4 Politics Purified: Religion and the Growth of Antislavery Idealism in Republican Ideology During the Civil War Mark E. Neely, Jr.

CHAPTER 5 Defining Postwar Republicanism: Congressional Republicans and the Boundaries of Citizenship Jean H. Baker

CHAPTER 6 The Reforging of a Republican Majority Brooks D. Simpson

Afterword     James M. McPherson

Notes

Select Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

Preface

This collection of original essays examines the origins and evolution of the Republican party over the course of its first generation. The essays consider the party in terms of its identity, interests, ideology, images, and individuals, always with an eye to the ways the Republican party reflected and affected mid-nineteenth-century American concerns over national character, political power, race, and civil rights. Collectively, the authors extend their inquiries roughly from the 1850s through the 1870s to understand the processes whereby the second American party system broke down, a new party emerged, the Civil War came, and a new political order developed. They especially consider the ways the belief in free soil, free labor, free speech, and free men—the glue holding together the nascent Republican party's disparate supporters in the 1850s—congealed during war and Reconstruction to produce both a call for expanded political and civil rights for the freedmen, and sometimes others, and a concern over expanded federal involvement in the protection of those rights, while at the same time leading the Republican party to push legislation that opened the West to further settlement and development, advanced commerce, and protected manufacturing. In so doing, the party of many parts—anti-Nebraska Democrats, former Whigs, Free Soilers, temperance advocates, nativists and anti-nativists, and others who came together to oppose the extension of slavery in the 1850s and to save the Union in the 1860s—increasingly bore the likeness of a new Whig party. The essays also point to the importance of decisive moments and significant individuals that shaped the party's identity during its formative period.

By observing the transmutation of a sectional party born in the 1850s into the Grand Old Party of the 1870s, the authors show, in the end, how the war and its aftermath recast political categories and shifted national power to northern interests, where it largely stayed well into the twentieth century. Although Republican Reconstruction failed in the 1860s and 1870s, and although the party began to divide over issues of continued support for Republican governments in the South, corruption in the Grant regime, patronage, foreign policy, and economic issues, the party still triumphed in other ways in the new national political order of the postwar era. By the 1870s, however, much of the first generation of Republicans had passed from the scene, having retired from office, been defeated for reelection, or died. New men and new interests came to rule the Grand Old Party.

The essays in this book try to seize the historiographical moment of renewed interest in political history and new thinking on the place and meaning of the Civil War in American life by getting hold of a subject more often implied than explained. For all the historical attention devoted to the Republican party and the Civil War, the birth and growth of the party have received surprisingly little sustained inquiry. Previous works on the early Republican party have focused on particular events and individuals and rarely have tracked the history of the charter generation of Republicans and the formative ideas of Republicanism over their political life span. General treatments of the party too often cast its history in terms of the political identities and fortunes of a few figures and slight the interplay of principle, partisanship, and politics that defined the party and the age. This collection offers various perspectives on party formation and growth and modern syntheses and assessments of the best, recent scholarship on the party and the period. In it, the authors not only see the party in terms of its architecture of belief and interests, but also observe its organic qualities of men, and women, struggling to translate belief and interest into policy. And they recognize, too, that such struggles sometimes pushed the party in directions its original structure and composition did not intend. By bringing together leading historians on the genesis of Republicanism, this book, we hope, opens up the conversation on the meaning of party and politics and of the Republican party experiment and experience.

* * *

This book, like the early Republican party, is a product of many hands. While historians dispute the site of the first Republican party meeting, there is no doubt about the origins of this book. It rests squarely and comfortably at 1314 Locust Street, Philadelphia, at the Library Company with Librarian John C. Van Horne, Phillip Lapsansky, Chief of Reference and Curator of its Afro-American Collection, and the rest of the staff of the Library Company. They first recognized the need to raise the issue of the genesis of Republicanism, and then mounted an exhibition and symposium to draw scholarly attention to the subject. The result was The Genesis of Republicanism: The Birth and Growth of the Grand Old Party, 1854-1872, held in October 2000, which provided the inspiration for this book. The efficiency and good humor of the staff in preparing the exhibition and assembling materials for the book kept the project on pace and in order. This is their book as much as anyone's.

All the illustrations in this book come from the Library Company of Philadelphia collections, and virtually all were represented in the exhibition, which included hundreds more documents and materials, from broadsides, campaign literature and paraphernalia, playing cards, songsters, and voters' tickets, to book-length biographies, published speeches, and pamphlets and booklets from hosts of organizations and individuals arguing about people, politics, and principles. The book also includes an illustrated overview of the Genesis of Republicanism drawn directly from the exhibition. The illustrations, though, only hint at the rich collection of print and illustrative resources the Library Company has acquired on mid-nineteenth-century politics and public life. In that regard, this book comes not only as an invitation to explore further the issues of party politics and process during the Civil War era, but also to use the Library Company collections in doing so.

Generous support for the exhibition and symposium came from the Louise Lux-Sions Exhibition Endowment Fund, the Pennsylvania Humanities Council, the Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, The Pew Charitable Trusts, the Philadelphia Cultural Fund, and the Quaker Chemical Foundation.

Moving this book from conception to realization was Robert Lockhart, our editor at the University of Pennsylvania Press. He immediately understood the foundation and framework of the project and supported it with encouragement and wisdom, while steadily nudging it along as it matured from idea to book. All historians should have an editor as sensible and sensitive as Bob Lockhart and a press so willing to support its editor and authors.

Librarians and staff at several institutions helped us in gathering information, checking references, and more. The Library Company of Philadelphia led the way, with its vast and deep collections providing not only the texts for the exhibition but also context in presenting the exhibition and organizing the book. The librarians at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania helped in research queries relating to the exhibit and the book. The editors also profited from materials at or received through the good offices of the libraries at the Civil War Library and Museum in Philadelphia, the Free Library of Philadelphia, Haverford College, Saint Joseph's University, and the University of Pennsylvania. At Saint Joseph's University, Maureen Carothers did bibliographical searches and other tasks with intelligence and energy. Michael Birkner, Paul A. Cimbala, Daniel Crofts, and John David Smith provided useful suggestions to improve the content and character of the book.

To all who provided support, assistance, and guidance, we give our thanks. We hope that this book will repay their encouragement in the free exchange of ideas.

Introduction

The historical period discussed in these essays is the most transformative era of American history. There was one nation, called the United States of America, in 1850 and another very different nation, using the same name and occupying the same space, in 1876. The primary instrument and chief beneficiary of this transformation was the Republican party. All the major issues that had divided the early Republic and led to civil war were settled for at least the next century by 1876. And all of them had been decided in ways that empowered the region and classes represented by the Republican party.

By the end of this era, the issue of state versus central government power had been settled; the federal government was indisputably superior, however much states' rights resurfaced periodically thereafter as a shibboleth of the white South. The question of the regional locus of power also had been resolved in favor of the Northeast over the South and West. The right of the Northeast to settle the West and to spread its institutions westward was now uncontested. And the distribution of national wealth had been realigned. Henceforth, the great agricultural bounty of the South would profit New York financiers more than it would southern farmers.

During these same years an agricultural nation became an industrial one. The triumph of free over slave labor was assured, as was the supremacy of capital over labor. The dominance of white upper-class males over other Americans who were women, poor, or nonwhite was established for at least the rest of the century, though this dominance remained contested, sometimes violently so.

Most dramatically, the great shame of the nation—slavery—had been exorcized. But emancipation was at best a limited success. The Constitution had been rewritten to abolish slavery, provide national citizenship, and guarantee equal protection under the law, but African Americans remained repressed and despised in all regions of the nation, brutalized and exploited most harshly in their own southern homelands. For these triumphs and this enduring tragedy, the Republican party also bore a primary responsibility.

The dilemma of racial slavery created the climate of crisis in which the Republican party was born. More than fifty years ago the great scholar of the sectional crisis, Allan Nevins, completed his multivolume study of Civil War causation. After nearly 2,000 pages of intricate argument, and in tortuously opaque language designed to give least offense to either side, Nevins offered his conclusion about the coming of the Civil War:

The main root of the conflict (and there were minor roots) was the problem of slavery with its complementary problem of race-adjustment; the main source of the tragedy was the refusal of either section to face these cojoined problems squarely and pay the heavy costs of a peaceful settlement. Had it not been for the difference in race, the slavery issue would have presented no great difficulties. But as the racial gulf existed, the South inarticulately but clearly perceived that the elimination of this issue would still leave it the terrible problem of the Negro.¹

In the years before the war, northern politicians had to tread delicately among their constituents' intertwined and often contradictory passions: hatred of slavery, hostility toward the white South, and antipathy toward black people—wherever they might reside in the nation. Most northerners, in their Negrophobia, were prepared to let blacks continue to suffer in southern bondage, but also were determined that the new territories of the West would be reserved for free white men and their families. As our essayists note, it was the threat of expansion of slavery, specifically, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, that brought the Republican party into being. The new party was an amalgam of many northern elements: Free Soilers, who were antislavery but also frequently antiblack; supporters of the American or Know-Nothing party, which was anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic; some remnants of the old Whigs; along with abolitionists, women's rights advocates, and friends of temperance and other reform groups. They all agreed only that the South and slavery must be contained.

The Republican party capitalized especially on northern resentments of southern bullyrag and abuses of power, whether by southerners in Congress blocking legislation to promote internal improvements, raise tariffs, or open western lands that would benefit northern interests, or by southerners demanding that northerners do their bidding in chasing fugitive slaves under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and silencing anti-slavery voices in the North. The image of the Slave Power looming over the map, threatening to force slavery everywhere in the free territories and secure slaveholders' interests everywhere in the nation, increasingly defined the South in the northern mind.

Republicans understood this because their existence and reason-for-being derived from it. And Republicans used every means of politicking to awaken voters to the dangers of an expanding Slave Power and to the virtues of the new party's positions on free soil, free labor, free speech, and free men. Through torchlight parades and other public processions, speeches, newspapers, and all manner of publications, the new party brought its case to the people. In an age when politics was a form of outdoor entertainment, and when politicking went on almost all the time, Republicans traded on popular imagery to mobilize many new voters and to galvanize supporters to support a cause. In doing so, the party staked out its claim to legitimacy. It also masked policy differences in a party of many parts.

But there was no assurance Republicans would survive as a party. Republicans were not the only new party or the only voice for freedom. And by defining itself principally in terms of protecting a northern sectional interest, the Republican party had few prospects anywhere in the South or among Unionists worried that the constant drumbeat of sectionalism in politics would cause disunion. As Michael Holt argues, the Republicans' overtly anti-South, regional stance left in doubt whether they could become the chief alternative to the divided and vulnerable Democratic party. At a time when old party structures were realigning or coming apart and new parties were emerging, no one was sure where or to what extent to invest political loyalties. The sectional crises of the 1850s revealed the fragility and impermanence of parties that made party organizers overly conscious of the need to court voters vigorously and build party infrastructure rapidly. Achieving party unity became as important as espousing party principles. To achieve its all-important national victory in 1860, the new Republican party had to modulate its anti-South, antislavery stance. It would not be the last compromise of principle in exchange for power committed by the Republican party as it consolidated its position during war and Reconstruction.

Control of the national government ensured the survival of the young Republican party. While conducting a war and presiding over an enormously expanded central government, the party also saw to many of the agenda items desired by its variegated constituency. It responded to its white, middle-class, free soiler base with the Homestead Act, which parceled out millions of acres to native and immigrant white families during and after the war. Congress also passed the Morrill Land Grant Act, creating the system of agricultural and mechanical colleges that became a mainstay of American higher education in the postbellum years.

At the same time, the party was able to satisfy its Whiggish element even more generously. The higher protective tariff, the Pacific Railroad Act, and currency and banking reforms passed by Republican majorities in Congress were all longstanding planks in the Whig platform. More important, as Phillip Shaw Paludan demonstrates, party officials created partnerships with business and industry that would survive and expand long after the war. The needs of capital overwhelmed the needs of labor, and the mantra of wartime patriotism was often used to enforce labor's submission.

And in the course of the war the party helped institutionalize a form of civic religion that celebrated the national state in terms that were assertively northern and Protestant. Thus the regional and sectarian biases of Republicanism were well established by war's end and lasted well into the following century. The three major American Protestant denominations (Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians), which had divided over slavery and theological issues, retained separate northern and southern branches throughout a similar period.

One element crucial to the prewar formation of the Republicanism and its well-being during the conflict was largely ignored by the party leaders. As Jean Baker explains, women and advocates for the expansion of their rights were relegated to the fringes of the party as soon as victory was won. Even Frederick Douglass, longtime supporter of women's rights, believed—inaccurately as would soon be apparent—that the postbellum era was, in abolitionist Wendell Phillips's words, the Negro's hour.

On all these issues save the last, the leaders of the Republican party managed to situate themselves on the side of both virtue and power. But on the two elements of Nevins's conundrum—slavery and race—the new party was forced into near schizophrenia. To placate its more conservative elements, the Republicans adopted a platform in 1860 that was notably less strident on slavery than that of 1856. Indeed, in pursuit of a Lincoln victory, Republicans promised in their 1860 platform that they would respect the Constitution and protect slavery where it existed. In an attempt to reassure the South of that position, Lincoln even signed and conveyed to the states a version of the Thirteenth Amendment passed by Congress during the secession crisis and earlier endorsed by outgoing President James Buchanan that would have forbidden congressional interference with slavery in the states forever. But Republicans in 1860 and early 1861 walked a tightrope, not wanting to alienate conservative Union supporters by threatening slavery directly but needing also to satisfy their primary constituency, which expected them not to capitulate to southern threats or relax efforts to check slavery's advance into the territories.

Secession and war changed the politics of slavery. Saving the Union soon demanded attacking slavery. Republicans in Congress and the president both took steps that would undermine slavery in the first two years of the war. The Confiscation Acts and Lincoln's preliminary emancipation proclamation in 1862 provoked a northern backlash that cost the party several congressional seats in the 1862 elections and hurt Republicans in several state contests in 1863. Chastened by the backlash and criticism of Lincoln's conduct of the war, the party emphasized Union, not emancipation, in the 1864 elections, even while the North grew